Is technical talent more important than Team Dynamic?  I don’t think so.  Read on and tell me if you agree.

The Art of the Interview For my job, I conduct quite a few technical interviews.  Rarely will I have a week go by where I’m not digging into someone’s brain trying to find out what they know and how they think.  However, understanding their technical knowledge is only part of the challenge.  We also must understand whether or not they code quickly, and whether or not they they will be a good fit for our teams.  Technical talent is only part of the equation. 

If you’re planning on an interview with Veracity, expect us to push you a bit, just to see how you react.  If you react poorly, even though technically you’re outstanding, you probably will not get an offer to join us.

We’re that serious about team dynamics.

Nothing will kill a team faster than someone who is technically strong, but refuses to work with the rest of the team.  The risk of failure on teams with members that...

I have a great interest in the secondary benefits that a company can pursue by utilizing agile.  One of those benefits might be innovation.  On July 21, I will lead a discussion on this topic.  This blog entry is an introduction to this discussion topic. I hope to see you there. 

Join us at our May 2011 Roundtable, where Jonathan Rayback from Motorola will discuss using Scrum in highly constrained scope/schedule/quality environments, and Joe McBride from Veracity will discuss discovering intrinsic motivation based on Drive from Daniel Pink.

Leadership Veracity consultants are an interesting group of people. We have some of the best and brightest people working to help our customers deliver great products to their customers.

While there are a lot of consulting shops in the industry, most are not like Veracity Solutions. Many shops simply want to put a body into a chair. They offer cheap hourly full time employee replacements (contractors) instead of people that can actually help their business be successful.

Veracity, on the other hand, really tries to fill the consultant role. Yes, we can pound out code like nobody else, but we can do more than just that, we can help them write the right code for their business. We can help them understand how their teams should function. Ultimately, our goal is that when we leave the team, we leave them in a better place than they were.

Knowing how to help their teams requires a skill that we try to make sure that we all have, and that is the skill of leadership. Almost any Veracity consultant...

How do we engage the client in the daily process of delivering valuable software.  So many times we see clients who would rather not be bothered by the process of creating software.  Yet client involvement is critical.

We recently returned from the HIMMS conference in Orlando.  While there, we spent a significant amount of time networking with CIO's, CTO's VP's of Dev and other healthcare IT leaders.

A recurring theme that we heard was, "We're implementing/starting/using Agile and we need help!"  Most of the companies we talked to are in some state of Agile adoption.

To me, this is very gratifying.  Companies are starting to realize that Agile can help their organizations be more efficient and effective at developing software.

I also think that Agile Executives is starting at the right time.  As a community, we can help the individuals leading development teams in these organizations become better at Scrum.

 

Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum.

As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software.

However, not all executives understand Scrum and how to get the information from development teams that use Scrum. I think that these executives need a support system for managing Agile teams.

Historical Software Management When Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line, I doubt he realized the impact he’d have on Management through the ages. Historically, management was about managing the process of building things. The people were just cogs in that process. Like all cogs, they were replaceable.

Unfortunately,...

Value stream mapping is a Lean tool used to identify process improvement opportunities.  This blog post includes value stream maps of a typical waterfall development process and the increase on overall efficiency that agile provides.
Value Stream Mapping of Waterfall and Agile

Your Team Needs You The introduction of Agile into a corporation has many impacts on the team, and many impacts to the executives leading those teams.  In my experience, many Agile projects fail, not because the team did their best, but because the executives that should have been supporting the team failed to do so.  This lack of support can be manifested in many ways.  I’ve seen executives fail by doing the following:

Failure to help with the prioritization process Failure to pay attention to the teams Failure to treat the team as a team Fixing Time, Cost, and Features And many, many more.  I’ll address each one of these in turn, detailing why the practice is wrong and how to better approach them.

Failure to Help with the Prioritization Process This is a classic mistake.  The executive fails to set clear priorities for the development teams and product management teams.  With agile, the team really can deliver quickly and at low cost, but if priorities are constantly changing,...